What's in a name/

[Trees]

Can we deduce anything from the names given to the children of a family?
For example I have a couple ,Benjamin and Sarah, who give their children the following names between 1809 and 1825:
Enos, Samson,Reuben,Delilah, Elisha, Drusilla,and Cinderella
The father's siblings and their children all had more conventional names with maybe one odd one in each family (Leban was one and Voye another) among the William,Benjamin and Johns I seem to remember reading somewhere that Biblical names indicated non conformist parents but f Cinderella!
SO WERE Benjamin and Sarah expressing their non conformist views or were they of Gypsy stock or just very individual people?

[jim1]

Traditionally there have been parts of the country where Hebrew names were very popular. The Black Country springs to mind. Sometimes down to an individual's choice to pick them although Cinderella isn't one.
In addition there were many areas where there were large extended families so an unusual name would make them stand out.

[lizdb]

Sometimes I think it is a danger to read too much into names.  We often "assume" William will call his son William, or because his Dad was James then the family with son called James is more likely to be "ours" than another.  Often this is the case, and looking at names can give sway our thinking alongside other circumstantial evidence.
But often there are names that appear in our trees that, on the face of it, come from nowhere. They must have just been a name that had particular meaning to the family at that particular time, or that they had seen or heard somewhere and just liked. Alongside the regular Williams, James, Thomas, Elizabeth, Mary and Annes that many of us see over and over again, we see that other names did come in  and out of fashion - like Philadelphia etc.
Around the turn of the 19th to 20th century, all sorts of names came into play - and I can imagine the older generation being shocked at these new fangled names!  Percy, Reginald, Leslie, Victor, Norman, Edith, Winifred, Lillian, Vera etc.  And ever since then, new names have appeared, with some staying popular over time, and others just having a brief season of popularity, so that you can almost guess the approx age of someone with that name.
I remember the horror amongst the older people in my family when the youngest generation started arriving and were given 21st century names. But then, when I thought about it, those people desparing of the "newfangled" names were called Jean and Eileen, both popular names in the 1920's, but before that they werent, so when their parents chose these names they must have been equally unusual and "newfangled" to their older rellies!
It is an interesting subject - well I find it so!

But I still wonder why in one of my families, (full of the usual names of George, Sarah, Francis and Richard as per generations before), with no known Scottish or Irish connections, they suddenly named one little boy Fergus Duncombe O'Connor Moon!   Por little chap did not live long, and they reused the name Fergus for the next baby boy, but without the fancy middle names, who did live to adulthood.

[mazi]

Is there any connection to the Major Flavell, a tunnel keeper in ghostly hill,
or the john getty fllavell bapt. in Manchester

I think in this case this extended family, connected with the waterways, just specialised in fancy names,   Or.   they named the kids after their favourite towing horses .

Mike

[Sloe Gin]

Can we deduce anything from the names given to the children of a family?
For example I have a couple ,Benjamin and Sarah, who give their children the following names between 1809 and 1825:
Enos, Samson,Reuben,Delilah, Elisha, Drusilla,and Cinderella
The father's siblings and their children all had more conventional names with maybe one odd one in each family (Leban was one and Voye another) among the William,Benjamin and Johns I seem to remember reading somewhere that Biblical names indicated non conformist parents but f Cinderella!
SO WERE Benjamin and Sarah expressing their non conformist views or were they of Gypsy stock or just very individual people?

Cinderella is definitely a name favoured by Gypsies.  They also used Biblical names a lot so a Gypsy background sounds very likely here.

[sallyyorks]

Nonconformists, Methodists, Wesleyans and so on, often used Old Testament names. They became fashionable

[clayton bradley]

In reply to lizdb, just Google Fergus O'Connor. I also have a Fergus O'Connor in my extended tree, who died as a small child because of the dreadful conditions in which the weavers of Lancashire were living. His mother was 30 when she died. cb

[lizdb]

Thanks Claytonbradley
That is really interesting. Maybe it was him that inspired them?  I do wonder how a family living in Sussex, head a cordwainer, would have even heard of him though, yet alone been insprired to name their son after him. However, I see from Wiki that he organised a Chartist meeting in Kennington in 1848. Little Fergus Duncombe Oconnor Moon was born in 1848, so maybe!

[sallyyorks]

In reply to lizdb, just Google Fergus O'Connor. I also have a Fergus O'Connor in my extended tree, who died as a small child because of the dreadful conditions in which the weavers of Lancashire were living. His mother was 30 when she died. cb

Hi
Do you mean the prominent Chartist, Feargus O'Connor, who was popular in the north of England?
There is a list, available to download, of children named after leading Chartists linked on this site
http://www.chartistancestors.co.uk/chartist-children-1643-names/

"Chartists often named their children after their Chartist heroes, including Feargus O’Connor, William Lovett, John Frost, Henry Vincent and Ernest Jones"